245K views · Feb 15, 2019 · 1:29:27 · 2 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2021–2022
Kevlin Henney revisits structured programming, from Go To Statement Considered Harmful to block-structured code and object orientation. He argues it still matters for how we write code today.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN commenters point to it in discussions of goto, early returns and cognitive load when reading code.
Interesting talk on if/else/return and cognitive load when reading code.
If you haven't seen it, Kevlin Henney's talk about "The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming"[1] is interesting (if somewhat long in the examples later), and somewhat related. It's not specifically about return early (and a case could be made that it should or should not apply specifically to early return), but it is about if, else, return, and how they affect cognitive load when reading code. 1: this video
Good argument for structured programming over goto.
I get that, but the comment was specifically about pointers (not gotos or structure), and is interesting in general from a historical perspective. The "goto" keyword is similarly dangerous. I've seen very good arguments for leaving it out, and generally poor arguments for keeping it in a language. "I can use it safely" is not a good argument, because it's just like Jim Jefferies' standup routine linked above: "Why should I have my guns taken away from me?" An example of a good argument for structured programming is the talk "The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming - Kevlin Henney [C++ on Sea 2019]": this video Similarly, this article makes a very good argument that concurrent or async code is essentially the "goto spaghetti reinvented, but even worse ", and that Structured Concurrency is the solution: link
Source for justification preferring explicit else blocks over early throws.
For some of these reasons, I prefer to write this: if (condition) { throw } else { <rest of code> } Rather than: if (condition) { throw } <rest of code> The justification, which I found in this presentation ( this video ) is that if you only looked at the block structures, could you tell that the rest of the code might never run?
